London's priciest neighborhood report | August

City Rental News / August 15, 2017

Welcome to our August analysis of the priciest neighborhoods in London. Each month we take a look at the changing face of the London rental market analyzing the rental industry’s historical and live rental data.

About London

London’s pricey, we all get it. But just how pricey is it? It’s always been the most expensive city to live in the UK and has become a staple on priciest cities in the world lists. But this analysis takes aim at the supply and demand shifts in London’s priciest neighborhoods to find out just how expensive they really are. Even non-Brit's are likely to recognize a few of the neighborhoods on this list.

London has a metro population of nearly 14 million and a city density of 5,518/km2, creating a naturally low supply in the most desirable places. This is coupled with the natural demand of living within the city making London unaffordable for most.

This is supported by the average (median) rental price for a two-bedroom flat of our top 20 London neighborhoods being a staggering £3,915!

Rental Market Overview

The month-over-month shift in supply across London was especially felt by these pricey neighborhoods and seemed to have a major effect on their prices. The cumulative increase in live rentals of the seven returning neighborhoods was up roughly 240% compared to the same time last month. At the same time, we saw an average drop of roughly 30% in median rents in those same areas.

The main culprits were both Kensington districts and the Chelsea district increasing supply cumulatively by nearly 2,400 units. This is likely due to Universities closing for the summer and the wealthier students heading home abroad - creating an influx of ‘lower cost’ properties to hit the market.

Summer is certainly a known time for seasonality factors in dense university populations. It’s a good time to jump into a rental if you can stand the price ranges of these areas.

Methodology

This analysis was done by indexing current on-the-market properties by rent, bedrooms, and district code* then ranking them by their medians. This allows us to lower the effect of outliers, as you will see in the descriptive statistics section for each area. Each aggregated district code must have more than 30 live properties and must be a 2 bedroom listing.

*A district code is the first half of a postcode (3-4 characters, e.g. BN3 or SW1E) and gives a better look at neighborhoods than postcode areas (first 1-2 characters, e.g. B or EH).

When analyzing rental properties and geographic areas, we try to tailor our analysis to the audience, but this is just a fun exercise that everyone can enjoy reading. If you are interested in deeper analysis please feel free to PM me on LinkedIn or through www.rentcompanion.co.uk